Photographic Signs Research Articles

The photographic sign and the trichotomy of the trace

This article offers a novel perspective on the specific understanding of the photographic sign, situating the trace at the core of its functioning. The photographic sign is subjected to Peirce semiotics analysis, which reveals its underlying structure. This decomposition allows the establishment of a semiotic model that clarifies the essence and characteristics of photography and draws certain broader lessons about the notion of trace. On this basis, three categories of object are distinguished the trace, the indicant and the print. These three objects constitute what we call the Trichotomy of the trace which takes on its full meaning in the forensic field. Building upon this triadic model and our analysis of photography, we propose a refined definition of the trace.

Writing the world: photographing the text of the landscape

I am engaged in a practice led thesis, which has been challenged and shaped by thinkers in the fields of critical theory and philosophy. Although I work in dialogue with these theorists, I am principally a visual practitioner who is most at home with traditional, wet process photography.I began with a general concern regarding my own resistance to landscape photography as the depiction of the view, which has led me to question the persistence of the (illusion of) the unified photographic moment. My visual process, which began quite simply as a reaction against the pervasiveness of the view in photography, has, in dialogue with writers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Rosalind Krauss, enabled me to theorise my own photographic practice as a form of writing. Central to this has been the investigation of different theoretical configurations of the semiotic sign.I contend that Rosalind Krauss’ conception of Surrealist photography as a practice of écriture, in fact accounts for photographic practice more broadly speaking. The spacing of the photographic sign, which Krauss describes as an ‘invagination of presence,’ defers the confluence of the signified and the signifier thus rupturing the illusion of presence in the photographic moment: the shutter differences the image from the world and the practice of photography reconfigures the world as a form of writing. However, not simply in the sense of a surface inscribed by light, but writing as a space in which the possibility for meaning is realised.

Side by Side: The Halftone’s Visual Culture of Pragmatism

Charles S. Peirce’s late-nineteenth-century semiotic theory has long been considered one of the key frameworks for analysing the photograph as a visual sign. This article, however, proposes a closer look at Peirce’s contemporaneous philosophy of pragmatism as a fundamental component of the visual, cultural, and intellectual context within which the photographic halftone first emerged. When, exactly, did it begin to matter if a photographic image made up of a certain arrangement of graphic marks was read differently from a photographic image made up of a different arrangement of graphic marks? Such pragmatist questions were crucial to the early reception of halftone reproductions, which were often integrated into illustrated magazines as simply one element within an already diverse array of graphic codes. Turning to Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) as a case study, this article argues that reading the halftone as a chiefly photographic sign was not in fact an inevitable outcome of its introduction into the illustrated press in the 1880s and 1890s, but required instead a constant negotiation of both visual and conceptual imprecision – an imprecision eventually smoothed over in favour of an association of halftone technology with photographic ontology by the early twentieth century.

On Photographs at War: Images of the South African 6th Armored Division in Italy 1944–1945

The photography of the South African 6th Armored Division campaign in Italy in the World War II affords this essay its occasion for a consideration of the relation of photography to the political and historical project to which it pretends. The essay takes a loosely semiotic interest in the “signification” of war and of time, extending the sense of that process to encompass not only the mediation of concepts of the world, but also their invention against the disordering current of time. Its analysis of photographic signs form the campaign offers some specific insights into the particulars of the South African experience in the Italian theater, but more into the general compact between photography and history.

Roland Barthes in The camera lucida, the infidel semiologist

In Camera lucida, Roland Barthes forms a critical reflection on photography. In thiswork, the semiotician denouncing the myths of the photograph is the poet of hauntingimages to an invitation to the difficult task of recognizing the natural riches that may beperpetuated in a photographic image. We fear there another look toward the imagingtechniques, and other than that coming from the well-thinking tradition, with his vetoof the simulacra. We played with the hypothesis that the thesis of Camera lucida wouldbenefit from being perceived as a sui generis thinking about the photographic sign.

Hitchcock and small-gauge: Shaping the amateur fiction film

ABSTRACTAmateur film frequently earns its cultural value and claim to preservation as evidential substrate, a moving record of the past, with credibility rooted in the automatism of the cinematic apparatus and the indexicality of the photographic sign. Such potential is identified early within the organized cine movement, with ‘hobby’ filmmakers internalizing such definitions, as the quantity of non-fiction footage retained across the archive sector readily confirms. Less visible in critical commentary or the expanding catalogue is the amateur practitioner's commitment to the fiction film, despite ongoing engagement via templates derived from professional counterparts, alongside exploration of more autonomous non-professional modes and genres. For many such film-makers, the figure of Alfred Hitchcock assumes a particular prominence, influencing projects, authorizing story film techniques and acting as a theoretical counter in debates concerning amateur roles and creative potentials. With a view to locating such fascinations within the understandings of amateurism with which they have been implicated, this article considers first, arguments concerning the status of the fiction film within the cine movement of the 1930s; second, the organizational codes thereafter deemed appropriate to the cine enthusiast tackling screen fiction and third, the case of an amateur ‘thriller’ with a distinctly ‘Hitchcock touch’ from the 1960s, identified here to illustrate some characteristic dependencies and diversions of the cine fiction aesthetic.

Ideologies in Fact: Still and Moving‐Image Documentary in the Soviet Union, 1927–1932

This article is a comparative analysis of moving and still‐image documentary produced as part of the factography movement in the USSR. Factography was an interdisciplinary movement (driven in part by contemporary linguistic work) that sought to align with the First Five‐Year Plan by eliminating the opposition between signification and production, transforming the relationship between language and work. I examine Esfir Shub's The Great Way alongside a photo‐essay on “a day in the life” of a Soviet working family in light of the critical responses to them in order to highlight the set of beliefs these practitioners, critics, and audiences held about the meanings these mediums convey. Because these ideas revolved so centrally around concerns about the rootedness and mobility of photographic signs, I turn to models of entextualization and develop a notion of cinematic indexicality as both trace and deixis in order to explicate the media ideologies subtending these positions.[factography, cinema, photography, entextualization, indexicality]

Mona Lisa on a Bad Day: Or the Impossibility of Neutrality and the Non-Likeness of Photographic Portraiture

This article stems from my ongoing, rather speculative research into a category of photographic portraying that works beyond the limits of recording the individual, unmistakable likeness of a specific sitter in front of the camera. Transcending the constraints of lifelike reproduction, this critique of portraiture investigates the proposition that photographs can be considered as potentially non-mimetic portraits to explore “non-like,” iconic relations between a photograph and its model. Accordingly, I have constructed the term “Non-Likeness” as an extension of our understanding of the genre of portraiture, because—different from the German “Bildnis” and “Porträt”—the English language makes no distinction between individual portraiture on the one hand, and supra-individual (or non-like) portraiture on the other, including forms of metaphorical or allegorical portraying rather than visual identification. Based on a research-by-practice model, also mapping the background of my own artwork, the present article introduces both the blank face and its supposedly “neutral” photograph to identify questions regarding the seemingly canonical debates about the Photographic—the photograph's referential status as an index in opposition to the meanings arising from its surface. Examining different strategies of visual montage by stressing a gap between the photographic sign and its referent, the article explores the triangle of signification between model, image, and viewer, constructing a third meaning from its separated elements.

Desconstrução, opacidade e desmemória: a re-invenção da fotografia na prática contemporânea

The text intends to point out to a transformation in the universe of photography that exceeds technic dimensions. One is about a deeper mutation occuring in the statute ofthe photographic image, that is, in the singular way it produces senses. Historically, photography was always related to the idea o f speculate mimesis. The contemporaries workmanships, however, place in game a larger and more complex conception of mimesis. The photographic sign represents, but it is, also it, an object, an intentional and subjective construto. Through operations of deconstruction, of interference and opacity, these workmanships not only turn clear the mediatic constitution of the photography but also recreate it.

Signs of Anthropomorphism: The Case of Natural History Television Documentaries

This article employs Peirce's triadic concept of the sign, and Deleuze's theory of the image-movement to propose a social semiotic account of the ways in which visual signs in British and US natural history anthropomorphicise 'nature'. Peirce's semiotic is employed to critique both realist and relativist accounts of anthropomorphism. Although there may be a causally indexical relation between photographic signs and object, the fact that all signs are constituted by a three-way relationship between sign, object, and interpretant means that natural history documentaries, like the scientific texts that purportedly inform them, are ineluctably anthropomorphic. Deleuze's account of the image-movement is employed to explain why, far from being a dispassionate capturing of 'any-instants-whatsoevers', natural history image-movements organise movement in ways that are mediated by the semiotics of the natural history genre. As such, image-movements also constitute a form of anthropomorphism.

Signs of Anthropomorphism: The Case of Natural History Television Documentaries

This article employs Peirce's triadic concept of the sign, and Deleuze's theory of the image-movement to propose a social semiotic account of the ways in which visual signs in British and US natural history anthropomorphicise 'nature'. Peirce's semiotic is employed to critique both realist and relativist accounts of anthropomorphism. Although there may be a causally indexical relation between photographic signs and object, the fact that all signs are constituted by a three-way relationship between sign, object, and interpretant means that natural history documentaries, like the scientific texts that purportedly inform them, are ineluctably anthropomorphic. Deleuze's account of the image-movement is employed to explain why, far from being a dispassionate capturing of 'any-instants-whatsoevers', natural history image-movements organise movement in ways that are mediated by the semiotics of the natural history genre. As such, image-movements also constitute a form of anthropomorphism.